the devil is a lady
by billiespiper
Summary: "My white noise is about to get pretty loud, Sara" / Somewhere between Budapest and Monaco, Sara meets a girl with dark lipstick and an affinity for purple.


**author's note: first foray into the arrow fandom and it's not olicity im surprised too. okay so helena/sara isn't a thing on arrow yet but literally just wait two weeks i swear to god it will be asdfghk. anyway i wrote the first half of this before "heir to the demon" aired and it was like weirdly accurate to what was happening and then i just kind of forgot about it but now i want to post it before "birds of prey" airs and it loses any semblance of originality oKAy thank u.**

/

You went with her

And

When she screamed,

You heard your voice trapped like a canary,

Begging for Michael.

/

Sara travels the world in an admittedly impressive wild goose chase for the League. She buys economy class tickets under names of her favorite literary characters- she flies into Heathrow airport as Esther Greenwood, Charles de Gaulle as Jo March and Dubai International as Marla Singer (she also buys a ticket for Frankfurt airport under Laurel Lance, but that's besides the point). Learning languages had always come easy to her (she finished French when she was a junior and took accelerated Italian senior year, and even if it was only to flirt with foreign boys, it was pretty damn impressive), so Sara learns basic Russian on the flight to Berlin and during her four-hour holdover in Düsseldorf. After a flight delay, she calls Ollie on a payphone and stutters out "Здравствуйте, мистер Королева, как твой день " in an awful accent. He gives a monosyllabic answer, but she can hear him smiling, and within seconds, Felicity's voice rings out on the other end, asking if it's Sara and if she could please, please talk to her. She can recite numbers one through ten, ask where the bathroom is and for some reason, order a plate of unsalted French fries in basically every language. But somehow, she's standing in front of this imperceptibly beautiful girl with dark hair and black eyeliner and purple lipstick, and the English language ties itself up in knots on her tongue.

"Is there a name behind that blonde hair?" the girl is smirking, like she knows exactly why Sara is standing there with her mouth (embarrassingly) agape and dead silent. "Or do I need to make up some awful clichéd nickname? I think Barbie could work."

"Sara," she stutters out, thanking some deity she stopped believing in a long time ago for not doing something stupid like mispronouncing her own name. "Sara Lance."

The girl cocks her head disbelievingly, trailing a hand down Sara's arm to turn her fist over, ticket clenched tightly between white knuckles.

"Really? Because you have a ticket for Mina Murray. Maybe we should let airport security know you've misplaced your boarding pass," her voice is teasing enough, but Sara can hear the hint of a steel edge behind it. Sara doesn't respond, but twists her wrist to grab the girl's in reciprocation, warning her with just as much subtlety not to make a move.

They lock eyes and The Girl's (she's decided to make it a pronoun, assuming The Girl was not about to divulge her life's secrets or even her name to Sara. People who wear all black, historically, never do) widen just slightly, bemused grin slipping across her face.

"On the run, huh?" Sara doesn't respond again, but doesn't look away either, "Well then it looks like I'm getting a new destination." The Girl marches her and Sara to a ticket kiosk, where she purchases a seat on a sold out flight to New York without batting an eye. Sara doesn't ask. She has a feeling she doesn't want to know. When The Girl pulls out a passport (almost definitely fake), the name printed is Lucy Westenra. She glances over at Sara as if she's looking for some kind of reaction, and seems happy when what she receives is shock.

"Dracula was my favorite book growing up. You're not the only one who's read it. And you're definitely not the only person on the run, Barbie."

Sara snorts out a laugh. "I thought you threatened me with the nickname if I didn't tell you my real one, which I did, so." The Girl turns back to the machine, confirming her "purchase" and signing Lucy Westenra in curvy script that she is almost positive is not her real handwriting.

"Our flight boards in ten minutes, _Sara_. We'd better get going,"

Sara lets herself be lead away, definitely not protesting The Girl's grip on her wrist and is she just imagining her fingers tracing over her pulse point? Somewhere between being coerced into buying The Girl an extra large iced coffee and watching her finagle her way into the seat next to Sara's, she finds herself thanking that deity again for asking an intimidatingly fierce girl for the time in Budapest.

/

On the impossibly long flight to New York, the conversation gets weird.

"So, you are a lesbian, right?" Sara, who had been, up until that point, trying to feign interest in a SkyMall catalogue, turns to The Girl in shock. "I'm sorry, what?"

"You've got a total '_I am woman, hear me roar'_ vibe. And I found your other fake I.D.s when you went to the bathroom. There's an abundance of Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf characters," Sara lets out a disbelieving scoff, flipping a page of the magazine without looking at it before forming a response to The Girl's question.

"First of all, that is incredibly invasive- both the question and the looking through my shit," The Girl arches a tailored eyebrow, pouting her lips just enough for Sara to continue speaking. "And second, I decided long ago not to label myself. I thought I liked guys, but then I just sort of realized that they will always hurt you," thinking of Ollie is an unfair example, considering his recent transformation. But Ivo definitely brings up some unpleasant memories. Before she can stop herself, her brain unravels into itself, and she can feel Ra's hands on her arms, yelling over and over again to _just shoot them, damn it!_ and Nyssa watching in the background with her lips twitching and every other goddamn member of that horrible league transforming a troubled teen into a broken woman with years of pain behind her eyes, playing on a loop and-

When The Girl puts a hand on Sara's shoulder, she doesn't jump a mile in the air. Instead, her fingers are soothing and cool against her bare skin. The light scrape of her painted nails sends shivers shooting straight down her back, for reasons that she tells herself are _purely_ physical.

"Hey," The Girl's voice is softer than it's been in the short period of time she's known her. "Men suck. And most girls think they're straight until they realize… they're not,"

There's something so intriguing about the way The Girl speaks, and Sara feels like she's trying to comfort her and seduce her at the same time.

"You haven't asked me my name." Like that. Sara feels like she's walking into a trap with her eyes closed, and somehow is completely at ease.

"Figured you wouldn't tell me. You don't seem like the type."

"Neither do you, but I got Sara after talking to you for ten minutes." She smiles and rips open a bag of airplane peanuts. "You could have asked. I would have told you."

It's like The Girl wants her to ask for it. To beg for it. To get on her hands and knees and cry that she'll be satisfied with just any little detail, and _oh_ what a mystery you are, Mystery Girl!

"No, thanks." Sara attempts nonchalance, looking down at an all-edges brownie pan being advertised for thirty dollars. The Girl falls silent, and Sara wills herself not to look at her, not to look at the curve of her painted lips or the probable flutter of her eyelashes. The Girl mumbles something under her breath, and it sounds like a curse but Sara can't be too sure. She asks her to repeat it.

"I said, Helena. That's my name. You don't get a last name,"

Satisfied, Sara turns back to face her, only to find Helena (the name sounds like learning a new language, thick around her jaw but rolling perfectly between her teeth) sliding a pair of headphones over her ears, pointedly glaring at Sara and dialing up her music. She can hear the baseline of a pop song thudding out through them, which (yet again) surprises her. She took _Helena_ for classic rock, or heavy metal. Instead, she's pretty sure One Direction is on full blast. Then again, it has been five years, so her judgment on pop culture isn't too great.

They spend the rest of the flight playing a cat and mouse game of conversation. Sara pretends to sleep when Helena slips off her headphones. Helena gets up to slink her way to the dirty airplane bathroom when Sara turns to talk.

(Somewhere over the Pacific, Sara falls asleep with her head on Helena's shoulder and wakes up with drool dried around the edges of her mouth, the girl in question looking calmly down at her.)

/

They spend two days in a crappy Super 8 motel paid fully in cash on 3rd Avenue. Helena talks about how they're probably contracting ten different STDs and picking up three variants of bed bugs or lice just by sleeping in the sheets. They get a one bed room, to save money, but that is completely beside the point and irrelevant anyway. Sara people watches, partly to keep an eye out for any and all members of the League and partly because people from this side of Brooklyn are _weird_. She sees a plethora of strollers, but also a group of teenage girls chain smoking outside of dive bar. Half the time, the people outside look dirty and have metal in their face. The other half is toting Whole Foods bags and kale shakes. Helena doesn't say anything about her obsessive surveillance- or about how she stares at the housekeeping through the peephole for five minutes before opening the door. In return, Sara doesn't bring up the way Helena ducks her head when they walk by cop cars, or how her entire body tenses when someone approaches to ask for the time or for a light. There's some kind of a soothing mutuality to it, and beyond the first day, neither of them push the other into any revealing secrets.

It happens anyway. When Helena suggests taking a cruise liner from Chelsea Piers all the way down to Miami, Sara tells her she has a _thing_ with boats. Helena is quiet for a moment, before nodding. _Of course_. She had Googled Sara intensively after touching down in New York, snorting at the six degrees of separation with Oliver Queen. She read her obituary five times before printing it out at the nearest copy shop, folding the paper into a pocket-sized square. After her slip, Helena hadn't been inclined to push it any more.

They spend too long holed up in their motel room. Sara learns that Helena only drinks iced coffee, and that she has this habit of sleeping in a ball. Helena counts the beats of Sara's words, the way she speaks just above a whisper with her syllables stretched at all times. Helena paints her nails and her eyes and lets Sara borrow her clothing, just to go down to the front desk and extend their reservation. Sara doesn't ask why Helena followed her to New York, and she certainly doesn't the offer the information. For hours on end, she likes to pretend that she's not running from a league of assassins, that she's just spending the weekend in a foreign city where the cold bites deep into your skin and the pizza tastes like a love poem.

When Oliver calls her, she's forgotten every broken piece of Russian she learned when she was nestled into a hidden airport corner (she used to know every name, used to keep her ticket stubs tucked into the waistband of her jeans like blades against her skin. Since coming to New York, she's lost all but the one from Ferenc Lizst International). He tells her that Laurel needs her before hanging up without further explanation in that annoyingly _Oliver _way.

Helena doesn't look up from an outdated magazine when Sara tosses the prepaid cell phone on the spotted yellow mattress. She asks for a location, and when Sara tells her Starling City, Helena makes a noise that sounds like pure frost.

"Perfect. I've been wanting to visit some friends in the Star City,"

/

_Laurel's wearing her rings._ She recognizes her class ring first, the one she'd begged her dad to buy for her and worn for a week until the fake silver turned her fingers green. Laurel's nails are black and from her vantage point, Sara can count every bone in her chest, collarbones thrusting from her body like hardwood shelves. Every tooth is shining when she smiles hazily, pushing the mess of ringed fingers through the knots in her hair. Laurel says her name like a prayer and a spell and misses when she reaches up to grab her face. Her hands smell like leather seats and drinks with umbrellas in them and in an instant, she's reminded of that one summer where Laurel ate pomegranate seeds obsessively, fingers and lips stained purple so often that her dad joked they'd stay that way permanently. She smelled like sour fruit that entire year and Sara noticed immediately when she came home at two in the morning, heels off or broken, smelling like Oliver's cologne.

When Helena looms in front of her, dark hair swinging like a pendulum over her face, Sara realizes she hasn't moved.

"I told you to stay at the hotel."

With surprising softness, and a vague flicker of recognition, Helena slides her hands under Laurel's arms hauling her to the couch and turning her so that she's lying on her side.

"Never let drunk people sleep on their backs. They'll choke on their own vomit," she moves into the bathroom to get Advil and a cup of water for when Laurel wakes up, footsteps not making a sound despite her impressively tall heels. Sara picks up the heavy brass spyglass (the one she broke when she was younger, that her dad spent a month's salary getting repaired) that takes up permanent residence on Laurel's coffee table. There's a photo of her when she was younger, gap toothed and freckle faced, that she knows covers up a photo of Ollie and Tommy. It's the one Laurel took the summer before the Queen's Gambit set sail, the one where Ollie wears a decidedly awful sweater tied around his shoulders, and Tommy is grinning at some spot above his best friend's head. She chalks it up to something like survivor's guilt that there's now a seven-year-old Sara between the glass and the backing.

Helena comes back into that room in her super stealth way, and the only sound in the room the rhythmic clicking of the cheap grandfather clock in the hallway. The soft vibrate of Sara's phone sounds like church bells in the silence.

"Hello? Yeah, Ollie, she's okay. She might have alcohol poisoning, but," she raises her head to look at Helena. "That's nothing new,"

Helena pointedly avoids her stare, pushing her fidgeting hands to rearrange the mess on the glass table, straightening and restraightening the spyglass until it stops rolling sideways.

"At Verdant? I can be there in ten minutes. Laurel's not waking up for at least twelve hours, anyway. I'm with a friend, but she's… I trust her," Helena gives her a look; something she can't quite read but which vaguely feels like sadness. She doesn't respond to Oliver's rough goodbye, but keeps both eyes trained on Helena. Her fingers are twitching against the table, no longer organizing anything but instead letting her dark nails tap out a steady and neurotic beat. Sara leans forward to cover Helena's hand with her own, running her fingers down the side of her hand to stop the motion.

"That's quite the nervous tick."

"You asked me for the time and I followed you to New York City. You barely know me. How can you trust me?" The question is half accusation, and half genuine disbelief.

"If my memory serves, there was quite a bit of flirting between those two things," Helena doesn't smile. "And I haven't told anyone my name like that in a… long time. When I was talking to you, I felt like I was taking a gap year in Budapest, like I was a regular girl who had no reason to use fictional characters as identities. I felt like I didn't have ten fake I.D.s in my backpack, or that I owned a cellphone with pictures of my friends, my sister, and not some crappy prepaid Motorola. I felt like I did, before that island. If I learned one thing, it's that you can only trust your instinct. Everything else is white noise."

She still doesn't look at Sara, but an incredibly uncharacteristic smile crosses her face. It's the first time she's smiled without that wolfish bite to it, without the dark lips pursed or eyelashes batted.

"My white noise is about to get pretty loud, Sara."

/

In ten seconds, there's an arrow hitched into Oliver's bow and it's pointed directly at Helena's jugular.

Sara doesn't miss the way Felicity takes two steps back, and definitely doesn't miss how Oliver steps directly in front of her.

"Listen to me, Sara, whoever you think she is, she's dangerous. She's evil. She's _crazy_."

Helena snorts, and attempts to play off her beating heart by playing with the ends of her hair. "That is so harsh, Oliver. Evil? Maybe, very probably. But crazy? I'll have you know that I've been tested and I am perfectly sane."

Oliver obviously doesn't appreciate her (albeit) lame attempt at humor, evidenced by him pulling his bow string back further. She tries not to think about how she's one finger twitch away from bleeding out in _Starling City_ of all places. The blonde IT girl, the one who she'd tied up on the floor of her office places a tentative hand on Oliver's arm. The tension in his shoulders loosens, and Helena's suddenly thankful that she didn't kill her.

"Sara trusts her. And _we_ trust Sara. People change, Oliver. You know that," She's almost unrecognizable from the girl who scurried out of the lair when Oliver snapped at her, unrecognizable from the girl who wore panda flats and whimpered at the press of a crossbow into her neck.

"I do trust her, Oliver. She told me about McKenna, and her dad and everything else. And _Oliver_, she wants to help. Helena wants to help you, with the Mirakuru. She has a contact in China who's heard things about the drug being on the black market, someone who knows about the person who put it there. We could use another set of hands around here,"

Sara's voice is raspy by nature, but it's close to cracking, and Helena realizes that she's begging for her life. Or at least, her vital organs. Maybe her ability to walk.

Much like Oliver's position in front of Felicity, Sara shuffles forward cautiously, just angling herself before Helena. She feels cashmere under her fingers, and realizes she's reached forward to hold onto the end of Sara's sweater. Oliver regards her slowly, _painfully slow, _and lowers his bow just enough for Helena to let out the breath she didn't realize she was holding.

Felicity's fingers are moving slightly, nails scraping over Oliver's leathers in a soothing attempt. He's still breathing through his mouth (by the way, totally gross. Who would have pegged Oliver for a mouth breather?), but his trigger finger seems to be loosening- metaphorically, of course. Arrows don't really have triggers. Helena fondly thinks in the back of her mind that crossbows do, and immediately she craves the feel of one, heavy in her hand and tingling with energy. She craves the sound of an arrow releasing, the telltale zip through air and the satisfying punch of it hitting its target. She wonders briefly if Oliver would let her shoot at a practice dummy, and is quick to realize that asking would result in her becoming target practice.

"Tell me what you know about the Mirakuru, and then I'll decide if I want to trust you."

/

And thus begins a very odd, very strained friendship. Or at least, partnership. Helena thinks that partnership may even be stretching the well-defined limits of their working together.

Oliver is very careful not to leave her alone in the foundry, and oddly even more careful to not leave her alone with Felicity. She doesn't ask about the nature of their relationship, mostly because she doesn't want to know, but doesn't miss the way he drops swift kisses on her cheek or brings her the same pesto aioli sandwich every single day (and when she complains about not being brought food, he shows up the next day with some kind of deluxe dog food, which she's pretty sure if as much of a joke as she'll ever get out of him, so she kind of appreciates it, no matter how gross it is). Sara only leaves to check on Laurel through her window like a total creep, which Helena dutifully points out as she is a very good friend. From her permanent position on the sparring mats, she overhears a number of hushed conversations between Oliver and Sara. Mostly him berating her about how she is most definitely not helping like he wanted her to. About how Laurel now thinks she sees the ghost of her older sister, and is spiraling further. Sara usually doesn't have a response, and Helena asks Oliver to fight before her dimpled chin quivers any more than it already is.

She spends three days tracking the sale of Mirakuru throughout Asia with Felicity, letting the sound of hand-to-hand combat in the back be her soundtrack. Her brain to mouth filter seems to be permanently broken, and she's brought up that time she made her commit treason at least twice. Felicity gets to the lair everyday at seven, coming straight from the glass towers of Queen Consolidated, and works on the computers until eleven, when Oliver will come back from patrol and let his hands fall over her shoulders, dragging her chair backwards until her fingertips can't reach the keyboard.

Helena has a lot of spare time in the foundry. Both Sara and Oliver tell her they don't want to risk her being caught by the police (again). Diggle, ever supportive, tells her that none of them will bail her out if she does. She takes personality tests online and learns how to catch popcorn in her mouth impressively well - surprisingly, none of the other members of Team Arrow congratulate her on her newfound skill – and tries her hand at the salmon ladder (she fell after one rung, and appreciates not killing Felicity again when she promises not to say anything). Mostly, she misses reading on dingy motel beds with Sara, or going for coffee runs in the New York cold. Hours and days blend into one another, and she uses some excuse like seasonal depression or vitamin D deficiency to convince Sara to take her out on patrol. In black leather and fishnets, she pulls Helena's mask over her face and lets her swing first. She's pretty sure Oliver and Felicity are snickering about something when they leave, but she pretends not to hear it.

Helena has discovered that Sara is not much of a talker. At the airport, she had chalked it up to being tongue tied (she _had_ looked awesome, especially for a red eye flight), but quickly realized that by nature, or maybe by habit, Sara was more of an observer. This is especially true for long nights of patrol, when the only sound is the hum of the city and the occasional squeal of wet tires over concrete. Helena fiddles with the edge of her crossbow, Sara staring diligently out onto the street below.

"What's with the sonic screechy machine?" It feels very much like a last-ditch attempt at conversation, but at least she gets the slight turn of Sara's head, yellow glow from the streetlight slanting across her masked eyes. Helena expects her to question her weird naming, or give some frustratingly ambiguous answer, but she doesn't.

"When I was saved from the shipwreck of the Queen's Gambit, the man who found me said my name like it was some jewel that he could sell for a fortune. When I joined the league, Ra's told me that I couldn't be named Sara anymore. He said it like a curse, and by that point, it felt like one too," she turns back to the street, night blanketing her face so that she's camouflaged with the dark and contrasted against her pale blonde hair. "For some reason, I called myself the Canary. Looking back, I think they all thought that was pretty funny. They called me yellow haired, and said my smile would kill me, and whistled when I walked by. When I killed somebody for the first time, Canary sounded too bright, too virtuous for someone who had taken a life between her hands. I felt tarred, stained. Nyssa, Ra's daughter, suggested Black Canary,"

Sara's distracted momentarily, thinking of the way Nyssa had crept her fingers up her arm and pulled her into a cloud of jasmine incense and rasped out the name. Something feels strangely unfair about thinking of Nyssa not three feet away from Helena.

"I was incredibly skilled with the bo-staff, and could kick your ass in hand-to-hand combat, but they all thought I needed _something_. Nyssa, again, made this tech that let out a battle screech high enough to burst the human eardrum. She said it was only fitting for a bird of prey,"

"Nyssa sounds like she was quite the useful friend to have around," Helena's voice is uncharacteristically hard, and she pauses for a moment like she's heard how bitter she sounds. "But a Bird of Prey. I like that. Although, I'm not sure canaries are in the raptor family,"

Sara surprises herself by laughing. Helena bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself from smiling with her mouth open like an idiot, or something.

"What about you?" Sara pauses, deliberating whether or not to toe the line they've very clearly put down. "What's your trauma?"

To her credit, Helena doesn't look surprised. She makes this weird laughing sound, like she's trying to convince herself to say it. "Oh, just the trifecta of dead fiancé, evil dad and some seriously messed up jealousy issues. I think you have me beat on this one, in terms of reasonable vigilante backgrounds,"

Gloved finger making shapes in the rooftop gravel, Sara looks straight into Helena's eyes, straight down like she's seeing everything there. "That _is_ reasonable".

/

The next night finds her showing Sara some Tibetan yoga pose to relieve stress, Felicity hacking away at _something_, and the room pleasantly testosterone free, all three guys being out on patrol. Helena watches as Felicity's neon nails fly across her keyboard, lines of code spitting out onto the black screen like bugs. A couple more taps allows her access into every security feed in the radius the boys said they'd patrol tonight. On the computer, a leather clad Oliver turns and waves to the camera of a bank. The hood conceals his eyes, mask only further obscuring vision, but he's giving this stupid smile to the video, no doubt intended for IT eyes only. Helena snorts from her position leaning against the desk. Felicity startles, moving the comm link away from her mouth before she has the chance to squeak out her surprise.

"I understand that you are apparently incredibly skilled in the art of freaking people out, but could you please give me some warning before my heart gives up?" Helena doesn't have to say that she's overstating, something she's sure Felicity is used to hearing.

"You're good with that thing." It's a passing statement, even straying from compliment status. Of course Helena doesn't need to tell her she's good with it, Felicity _knows_ she is.

"It's my job. Well, my night job. It was my day job, but then I got the honor of playing Oliver Queen's glorified secretary." She does this weird gesticulating thing, where her eyes go wide behind her glasses and her fingers spread out with miles of space between them. "Lucky me."

Sara laughs from somewhere behind them, soft padding of her feet against the mats alerting her presence.

"Well, if you ever want an escape, Sara and I were thinking about starting an all girls crime fighting league."

Sara leans back, looking at Helena like she always does, with that hybrid of curiosity and quiet amusement. And Helena looks back like _she_ always does, hooded eyes and twitched lips.

"Were we?"

"We were," Helena ducks her head forward until she's right next to Felicity's face. "You could be our tech support."

Felicity pauses, cocks her head. Her smile grows as Oliver whines out a complaint over the links; something about how she's _his_ tech supportand he got her first or something. She mutes the noise and swivels her impressive looking office chair.

"We could call ourselves the Vagina Vigilantes,"

For the first time in a long time (before she found out that her daddy was a backstabbing mobster, way before she wore a red hair clip at Michael's funeral and watched dirt pile up on his grave), Helena laughs. Honestly and truly, without any ulterior motives.

/

Oliver walks in on Helena and Sara guiding Felicity into a fighting pose, both of their hands dangerously close to parts of her body he takes certain claim over, smirking at each other over her blonde ponytail. For a long moment, he contemplates taking over, contemplates holding her elbows and teaching her a particular kind of self-defense. He stops himself when Felicity manages a Krav Maga technique, something he had taken weeks to learn himself.

Pushing Diggle and Roy back up the stairs with only minor complaints, Oliver leaves the foundry to high pitched squealing and Helena's mild sound of surprise as Felicity throws her arms around the two completely contrasted girls.

/

Of course, nothing stays happy.

Nyssa shows up and tells Sara in no uncertain terms with those dark, dark eyes that she'll kill Laurel unless she comes back. The _to her_ is unspoken, and suddenly all the more heavy. Helena gets oddly protective, and spends hours in the Foundry as they work after plan after plan of attack, hands within centimeters of holding Sara's. They up the ante on Felicity's self defense in case of something nobody wants to say. Roy consistently suggests bursting in all gun-ho, using the element of surprise and literally nothing else. At one point, everyone gets too tired to refute it, and everything is mostly quiet until Sara knocks her chair backwards and storms out of the lair like there's hellhounds at her heels. Nobody says anything; nobody has to. Oliver stands, but Helena stands faster and is out the door right behind her, stepping out into the dismal rain pelting down over the Glades.

"Sara, come back inside. We can figure this out." Sara doesn't react to hearing her voice, and stays stationary, black leather jacket wrapped around her body like armor. _God_, she looks like she's going into war like this, blonde hair a helmet and her makeup like war paint. Helena thinks, distantly, that if Sara was going into battle, she would follow her over a cliff.

"It's never going to end, with her. You don't understand, Nyssa and I-"

"-Were lady lovers, yes, I understand," It's been a long couple of days for both of them, but she doesn't feel like getting the details of Sara's illicit assassin love affair.

"Don't do that, Helena. Don't pass it off like it was just _sex_ or something. I loved her for so long, and I didn't even realize who she was until after. I loved a _murderer. _I _was_ a murderer. Helena," Sara still hasn't turned around, and her wet hair is pressing down into her shaking shoulders. "I _am_ a murderer. I've killed people, and I'm no better than anyone in that godforsaken League. I don't deserve a second chance, and Laurel sure as hell doesn't deserve to be sucked into this, so _why_ is everyone trying so hard to help me?"

Somewhere between the first self-deprecating statement and about the time where she starts talking about her sister, Helena moves forward, into and out of the streetlamp, circling both her hands around Sara's shoulders.

"You want to talk about being a murderer? I've killed innocents, Sara. So has Ollie. So has Diggle. And they both got second chances; they _both_ got to be happy. God, you and him are so much alike, you're both so freaking tortured and broken and changed. But he found something that made him happy and he didn't let go, right? He found Felicity, and she found him and even I can see what that did to him. Take a page from his book, Sar. Find someone, or find some_thing_ that you care about and let them take care of you, for once,"

Helena doesn't even realize that Sara's kissing her until her short fingernails are trying to work their way through her dark hair. She pulls through a knot, and Helena hisses into Sara's mouth, leaning into her slick, black leathers. Helena's hands come to rest at the base of her skull, and for once, she's satisfied to leave them there. There's no sudden temptation to slip her fingers below the belt, or to push off her own clothes off in a frenzy (and although that may have something to do with the cold rain hitting her head, she'd like to chalk it up to something more romantic). When Sara pulls away, her smile is purple with Helena's lipstick, and smudged onto her adorably weird chin. She looks up, like she's noticing the rain for the first time, like she's actually feeling it on her skin and in her face and she _laughs_. Of course, a second later, she's pulling her leather jacket over both their heads and guiding Helena none too gently towards the entrance to the Foundry.

Felicity doesn't say anything when they come back in, despite their flushed faces and swollen lips. However, she does make a couple of incredibly _not_ discrete hand gestures that have Oliver tugging her towards the stairs and slipping her arms into a bright purple rain jacket. He pulls the hood up and over her head, and she giggles something unintelligible (probably a corny joke about having failed this city, or this Felicity. Anything's possible with her) before they disappear into the upper level of Verdant. Roy just about scampers up after them, throwing a half formed excuse about his girlfriend (coincidentally, Oliver's younger sister. Helena wonders absentmindedly how many times Roy's been "accidentally" hurt during sparring) and almost forgetting his phone in the process. Diggle sticks around pointedly, and Helena can tell he's still holding the like one or five counts of murder over her head, but then Sara makes even more pointed eye contact, and he slowly meanders up the stairs.

And, for the record, when everyone is gone, she and Sara do some things on the salmon ladder that would have Oliver diving for bleach.

/

Six days, some three hundred odd coffee cups and twenty-two energy bars later, they have a plan. Okay, Felicity has a plan. The rest of them have weirdly prideful looks on their faces and the muscle to carry it through.

Without going into too much detail, Team Arrow (Felicity's affectionate trademark has grown into a bonafide moniker) uses a combination of intelligence, passion and pure strength to force Nyssa into releasing Sara from the League. Somewhere around day four, Roy had suggested killing the youngest Al Ghul daughter, and Sara's face had turned grey. Although she didn't fully understand their relationship, she didn't question it, or what it meant to Sara- which was a whole lot. The only way this could be resolved without Sara reverting back into her little shell of sadness was to somehow persuade or reason with Nyssa.

It ended up taking less oral persuasion (God, she's hung around Felicity and her broken brain-to-mouth filter too long) and more of the faking-Sara's-death variety. It was something she and Ollie had been a little more than on edge about, but Diggle and Felicity had just poked at Sara's side and made jokes about coming back from the dead again. Felicity referenced some cultish sci-fi show (something about a confused physician?) and Sara had laughed, so Helena assumed the danger wasn't that imminent.

And it kind of stung to see Nyssa cradle Sara's limp body to her chest, to see her cry in shaky breaths while Laurel screamed out from behind a gag. But after just a little bit of Oliver's magic herbs, Sara was alive and breathing, and Nyssa was releasing her "in the name of Ra's al Ghul" (by the way, can you say melodrama?), and Laurel was, well, confused. Justifiably so.

In a little while, she'd be angry. After the initial shock of finding out that not one but two very important people in her lives were esteemed members of the Vigilante Club wore off, she would probably scream or throw something. Most likely, she would do both.

But the part that really mattered was that instead of Sara and Oliver retreating into their own broken selves, they would share their pain with the people that really cared for them. Felicity would let Sara crash at her place, and she would braid her hair with an offhand comment about it being a sleepover fundamental. Diggle and Roy would train with Oliver and then buy him dinner, and totally not let him win easier than usual. From time to time, Helena could even-

Never mind. Probably not. Any attempt at her comforting Oliver Queen was not one that would go over well.

And at the end of it all, Sara would crawl into Helena's bed, the one at that frighteningly expensive hotel, and hook her arms around her torso, both of them pulling into each other as desperately as they pleased in the dark of the night. Felicity would put Oliver's head in her lap and read him Shakespeare, voice slipping octaves to play different characters and him not understanding a word but laughing anyway.

At the end of it all, both Sara and Oliver, quiet and reclusive people (by nature or by habit), found someone who mattered. At the end, Sara and Oliver let themselves be taken care of by the two people who knew and cared the most.

/

Two weeks later, before he heads out for the night, Oliver drops a hastily giftwrapped crossbow in front of Helena and walks away. As he climbs the stairs, she can hear Felicity muttering something to him that sounds like "Try using your words for once, Oliver, they're not going to kill you".

The attached note reads; "Every hunter* needs a weapon of choice. You were good with the crossbow. Don't make me regret this" She follows the asterisk down to the bottom of the paper "*Huntress. Sorry".

Sara, reading over her shoulder, drops her chin to rest in the curve of Helena's neck.

"A Huntress and a Bird of Prey. Sounds like a perfect fit, don't you think?"

Helena smirks, letting one hand drift backwards until it finds purchase in Sara's hair.

"Sure, until I run out of animals to hunt and I turn on you,"

And then she swivels, and the rest of the conversation is lost in the press of her lips against Sara's, legs lifting to wrap around her hips and making a mental reminder to clean the training mats again before Oliver has a freak out.


End file.
